3D printing for children: What to build next?

The era of affordable 3D printing is clearly underway; indeed, the historical patterns of growth in 3D printing are, in many ways, strikingly similar to those associated with the growth of home computing in the late 1970’s. One of the prominent areas of increased interest in 3D printing is in the realm of education: fabrication tools are becoming available to college undergraduates and high school students, and even to younger children. Accompanying this burgeoning growth, however, there is an acute need to consider the ways in which 3D printing should develop, as a technology, in order to accommodate the abilities and activities of youngsters. This paper discusses a number of technological challenges to be overcome in making 3D printing truly available to children over the next decade. The most prominent challenges described here include: (a) expanding the range of physical media available for printing, (b) incorporating ideas derived from “pick-and-place” mechanisms into 3D printing, (c) exploring methods for creating portable and ubiquitous printing devices, (d) creating tools for hand-customization and finishing of tangible printed objects, and (e) devising software techniques for specifying, altering, and combining 3D elements in the context of printing. By facing these challenges, we can provide children (and adults) with a remarkably powerful and expressive means for creating all sorts of personalized artifacts.